An allograft includes bone, tendon, skin, or other types of tissue that is transplanted from one person to another. Allografts are used in a variety of medical treatments, such as knee replacements, bone grafts, spinal fusions, eye surgery, and skin grafts for the severely burned. Allografts come from voluntarily donated human tissue obtained from cadaveric donor-derived, living-related, or living-unrelated donors and can help patients regain mobility, restore function, enjoy a better quality of life, and even save lives in the case of cardiovascular tissue or skin.
Currently, soft tissue debridement from donated, cadaveric human bone is a manually intensive procedure that requires operators/technicians to manipulate metal gouges to repeatedly scrape extraneous adherent soft tissue (e.g., muscle and other non-osseous tissue) from the bone. This process is time consuming. A time-motion study assessing the amount of time required to manually debride human tissue from bone, excluding set-up time, revealed that the mean time to manually debride a human femur is nine minutes, while the mean time to debride a human tibia is seven minutes. The existing process also requires the use of sharp objects, while simultaneously gripping a slippery surface (i.e., bone and soft tissue) and requires operators to make multiple, repetitive hand-arm movements to remove all unnecessary tissue. These repetitive motions can lead to hand-arm related injuries and increase the operator's risk of musculoskeletal disorders resulting from repetitive motion damage, including tendonitis, carpal tunnel syndrome, osteoarthritis, and other pathologies. Such injuries and disorders can affect the mission, bottom line, work productivity, and employee satisfaction and engagement of an allograft processing center or tissue bank.
Others have attempted to provide automated or semi-automated systems and tools for tissue debridement from bone, but these systems present time, safety, sterilization, effluent disposal, and efficiency challenges.